CIA agents told to deliver Laden's head on ice

CIA agents told to deliver Laden's head on ice
http://www.navhindtimes.com/stories.php?part=news&Story_ID=050716

Reuters Washington May 6: The Central Intelligence Agency officer who led the first American unit into Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001, attacks said on Wednesday that his orders included an usual assignment: bring back Osama bin Laden's head on ice.

Mr Gary Schroen and his six-member CIA team arrived in Afghanistan's Panjshir valley two weeks after bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network orchestrated the attacks on Washington and New York that killed 3,000 people, prompting the Bush administration's war on terrorism.

A 32-year CIA veteran with long experience in South Asia and the West Asia, Mr Schroen's prime task was to build up Northern Alliance forces so they could join US troops in the overthrow of the Taliban.

But in the days that followed the worst terror attack on US soil, Mr Schroen said his boss at the CIA also told him and his deputy in no uncertain terms to kill the Al-Qaeda leadership.

What he said (was), I would like to see the head of bin Laden delivered back to me in a heavy cardboard box filled with dry ice, and I will take that down and show the President. And the rest of the lieutenants, you can put their heads on pikes, Mr Schroen told Reuters in an interview.

He was quoting Mr Cofer Black, a prominent US intelligence figure who was then the director of the CIA's counter-terrorist centre.

I don't think he meant that in detail... I think he meant to impress upon me and my deputy that this was very serious business and he wanted to get our adrenaline charged, Mr Schroen added yesterday.

Mr Black was not immediately available for comment.

Mr Schroen recounts his post-september 11 Afghan experience in the book, First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan, which will be published next week.

Mr Schroen (63), who is officially retired but continues to work for the CIA as a contractor, said the conversation was a turning point.

Other than in para-military co-operations, I have never in 32 years heard of an order to kill anyone. And in fact up to that day, my orders and the orders the CIA was operating under were primarily to try and capture bin Laden alive, he said.

Bin Laden's trail grew cold after the Bush administration withdrew its most highly trained special operations and intelligence units from Afghanistan in preparation for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, Mr Schroen said.

But he was encouraged by news yesterday that Pakistani security forces had arrested senior Al-Qaeda operative Abu Faraj Farj Al Liby, reportedly in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, a rugged tribal region where he believes bin Laden is hiding.

Bin Laden is almost a Robinhood among certain elements of the Islamic world, said Mr Schroen, who believes bin Laden's popularity is so great that Pakistan may not want to risk a potentially devastating political backlash by capturing him.

Going after Al Liby is much easier than going after bin Laden. He's by name a Libyan and he has no standing within the community, he said.

As the war in Afghanistan unfolded, Mr Schroen never got close enough to strike at bin Laden himself. But he worked on a plan to use Northern Alliance fighters to kill bin Laden's top lieutenant, Ayman Al Zawahri.

He was supposedly hiding out in the eastern part of Kabul. We paid for assets the Northern Alliance said they were running within the Taliban to go after him, he said.

The effort failed, however. It was far-fetched, Mr Schroen said. It was like to do something long-range while blind-folded.
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5/16/05
The $10 Million Man

Veteran CIA officer Gary Schroen was the agency's pick to lead the first U.S. team into Afghanistan, only 15 days after September 11. In his new book, First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan, he vividly recounts how the seven-man team (code-named Jawbreaker) helped the Northern Alliance defeat the hard-line Taliban regime--and stored $10 million in boxes in their office ("I can't haul around a 1,000-pound safe," he told a nervous CIA bean counter).

Was America prepared for the war on terrorism?

The CIA was ready. We knew what to do. The U.S. military, and I'm not denigrating their activities on the ground, but they were not ready. The Pentagon did not have a plan on how to go into Afghanistan and fight the kind of war it was going to take--a special operations war to defeat the Taliban.

One of your first tasks before heading out was ... shopping?

There's not a Q-type person passing out the special laser guns. When you get called to go to Afghanistan or Iraq or Bosnia and you don't have the stuff in your closet, you go down to REI or L. L. Bean and buy your gear just like you were going camping.

You tell of being frustrated by Washington bureaucracy.

A lot of us felt the stuff we would send in from the field wouldn't even be read. There was that story I told in the book about the Predator [an unmanned drone]. Two of my guys go down to look at an airfield that I paid for. I had given [the CIA] the coordinates and the reasons why we're having it refurbished. And we get a call from [the Predator's operators] saying we see two people on an airfield and one of them looks like he's not an Afghan and he may be [Osama] bin Laden and we want to shoot him with a Hellfire [missile]. And we said, "Well, we sent numerous cables. Did anybody read them?"

Will we get bin Laden?

There is no effort being spared at headquarters. The problem is that, as far as we can tell, he's in Pakistan. Unless we decide to break the self-imposed rule that we won't go in after him without Pakistani approval, we will be hamstrung. -Kevin Whitelaw
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/050516/16schroen.peo.htm

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The Sunday Morning Talk Shows - Review
Red State - May 8, 2005

- Ex-CIA man Gary Schroen was on NBC's Meet the Press with Tim Russert to hawk his book, First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on ...
http://www.redstate.org/story/2005/5/8/14240/59626

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'Bring me the head of Bin Laden'
The CIA sent a team to Afghanistan days after 9/11 with orders to kill Osama Bin Laden and bring back his head, a former agent has revealed.

Gary Schroen flew out soon after the attacks on New York and Washington, helping to set up the 2001 invasion, he told US National Public Radio.

He recalled his orders from the CIA's counter-terrorism chief.

"Capture Bin Laden, kill him and bring his head back in a box on dry ice," he quoted Cofer Black as saying.

As for other leaders of Bin Laden's al-Qaeda network in Afghanistan, Mr Black reportedly said: "I want their heads up on pikes."

Contacted by the radio network, Mr Black would not confirm that these were his exact words but he did not dispute Mr Schroen's account.

The agent told NPR he had been stunned that, for the first time in 30 years of service, he had received orders to kill targets rather then capture them.

But he says he replied: "Sir, those are the clearest orders I have ever received.

"I can certainly make pikes out in the field but I don't know what I'll do about dry ice to bring the head back - but we'll manage something."

One more mission

Mr Schroen, 59 when the planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, had just begun the CIA's retirement transition programme but he was asked to put it on hold two days after the attacks of 11 September 2001.

As a former station chief in both Kabul and Islamabad, he was considered to be ideally placed for the Afghan mission.

According to NPR, there was no doubt at CIA headquarters that the 9/11 attacks were the work of Bin Laden.

Mr Schroen was given a double brief, it reported: to liaise with anti-Taleban warlords on the ground as preparation for the overthrow of the regime, and to then assassinate Bin Laden and other top al-Qaeda figures.

The agency allowed Mr Schroen to pick his own six-man team and, exactly one week after 9/11, they were on a plane flying to the region, equipped with laptops, hand-held radios, instant coffee and $3m in $100 bills.

Mr Schroen has released memoirs called First In, a reference to the fact that he and his team were the first US government personnel on the ground.

He says he is surprised that the CIA has still not managed to track down Bin Laden after nearly four years.

Story from BBC NEWS
4 May 2005

CIA and Laden
http://www.turkishweekly.net/news.php?id=9577